Corporate Spring Cleaning

Much like the cluttered basement or the garage that can no longer serve its stated purpose of parking cars, procrastinators seem to always point to spring as a time to restore order in their world. Corporations are no different. Most businesses know instinctively that the concept of a file room is outdated, inefficient, costly and frankly dangerous. Ask yourself this simple question:

If this file cabinet, file shelf or file box were burned or otherwise destroyed, would it negatively impact my business?

If the answer is "yes", you just exposed the dangerous part of this question. But beyond that, what leverage would you have if the information contained in those files was immediately available to all authorized people in your organization?

The example that comes to mind is the attorney that thinks there may be an important point of precedence that was part of an earlier case file. Yes, it's important and might prove pivotal in the current case. But the time and expense to retrieve the file from Iron Mountain or some other paper repository is not justified by the hope that a legal pearl may exist within those archives. Now suppose that the time to check for that nugget of information was seconds instead of days. Being able to make queries like "show me every document that discusses the pipe wrench that killed Colonel Mustard" is quick to the point of trivial. That is how information contained in your document library can be leveraged to the advantage of the business enterprise.

The return on investment (ROI) calculation is simple. If you pay to make the final resting place for your documents be some "safe" off-site warehouse the size of a football field, then by the time you have stored those documents for 3 to 4 years, you would have paid more (even factoring present value of dollars to future) than if you scanned the documents and instituted a life cycle management program of document retention yourself. And if you actually retrieve and then re-file any of those stored boxes of paper, the ROI comes down to much less than 3 years due to the confiscatory fees that are charged for such services.

Now add to the straight ROI calculation the intangible but very real value of having all that information at your finger tips and the decision to clean up your document management garage should be a no brainer.

The number one objection to getting this done is usually the up-front cost. Even though the ROI calculation shows that over time you spend less and get more, there is no way to take away the fact that scanning of documents is a labor intensive process. You have to convert from paper to digital before any benefits can be realized. Many of our customers have said they would "gladly pay us tomorrow for a hamburger today"! PaperHost has listened. We know cash flows are tight, but we want to keep our excellent document production staff busy and employed. That is why PaperHost is actively working deals to allow our customers to get started today and spread the cost over may months or even years.

Of course the best way to get rid of document clutter is to never create it in the first place. PaperHost can work with companies to eliminate the need to print information on paper. That mean's intercepting data before it reaches the printer and allowing paper documents to be delivered as PDF files or go directly to document archives. Call us to learn more. But to the extent that paper will remain a part of your business work flow, we can help engineer the most efficient way to keep active documents available on-line and old documents available on optical media with free software to insure that your entire printed history remains available and retrievable forever.

It is gratifying to see companies embrace document management standards of excellence. Most find that a blend of scanning services with on-line hosting and long term optical retention is all they need to realize the benefits discussed above. But PaperHost enjoys taking next steps with our customers by finding ways to lift data from forms and documents, design workflows, build customer portals for accessing and viewing documents and much more. Once you start down the road to intelligent document management, you find more and more ways to leverage your valuable document assets.

- Jim Coyle

Go Green and Eliminate Paper Cluter

How much paper does your office go through on a daily basis?

If you’re like most companies, documents are printed and passed from office to office and then eventually tossed or filed away somewhere.

But with today’s technology, more and more businesses are finding ways to reduce paper usage. So not only are you saving trees in the process, you don’t have to order paper supplies as frequently.

Think about it: For most documents, it’s probably not necessary for them ever to be in paper form.

With a PaperHost solution, you can stop the print-scan-throw away cycle. We offer services that will streamline your company’s document management system – and simultaneously reduce your paper dependence.

Give us a call at 800-882-3573 to find out how your office can “Go Green” today!

Scanning Documents is Only Half the Battle

So you’ve been persuaded to go paperless.

Maybe your office is joining the green movement or taking part in the digital revolution. Whatever your reasoning, you now feel comfortable knowing that all your company documents have been scanned into a digital format.

But did you know that scanning is only half the process?

If your scanned files are gathering dust on a server somewhere, waiting there in case of an emergency, then your digital data is only being used to a fraction of its potential.

Through a well-executed document management system, information retrieval is a breeze. Your document library can also be optimized for comprehensive indexing, allowing for quick keyword searches as well as complex queries.

Use this indexed information to create custom reports and graphs from your digital data. You may even allow clients to access certain documents via password, eliminating the go-between.

For larger more text driven documents such as legal agreements, correspondence or medical studies, your documents can be run through an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine. This enables searching by any word, phrase or even word proximity searches across your entire library of documents. Once inside the document, the exact instances can be located and accessed with hyperlinks to quickly navigate to the exact verbiage that needs reviewing.

These features are tailored to fit seamlessly into your business environment, and the entire PaperHost system can be customized to closely match your company’s specific business practices.

Employees easily find the information they need; work gets completed faster, and your whole workflow system becomes streamlined for greater efficiency.

More and more offices are going paperless for a reason—because that digital database provides a valuable resource, which if strategically applied, can enhance business processes on a daily basis.

So if you’ve already made the leap into digital, don’t just let those files sit. PaperHost can help you put them to use for your business! And if your organization hasn’t been through the scanning process, PaperHost can get you started.

Learn more about how PaperHost can manage the entire lifecycle of your digital assets at www.PaperHost.com or contact us direct at 800-882-3573.

Where's That Document Again?

It’s 9:00 Monday morning.

You’ve just arrived at work—phones ringing off the hook, clients demanding answers—and all you need is one document to clean up the mess.

But where did you put that file? And even if you spend your whole morning searching for the file, can you be sure that the document is still in it? If that critical file or document is missing, how would you explain that to your clients?

These are questions no professional wants to face. It would be bad enough to walk into your office to find all your files missing, but in a modern business, files can be spread out over multiple storage rooms or even multiple buildings. How long might it be before you even realize that critical information has been lost?

As a matter of fact, research shows that typical businesses with 1,000 workers waste $2.5 million to $3.5 million a year searching for nonexistent information, failing to find existing information, or recreating lost information.

Say you did spend the entire morning looking for that client’s file only to realize it’s been misfiled or lost completely. Do you know where to look for a copy? If there isn’t a duplicate, someone has to spend additional company time and money to replicate the work.

Sixty percent of employees waste an hour or more per day duplicating the work of others. There’s no reason for your company to fall into this statistic. The implementation of a successful document management system can streamline business processes in every department of your office.

As document retrieval and filing time decrease, so will printing, distribution and storage costs. Did you know that companies spend $120 in labor to find a misfiled document and $220 in labor reproducing a lost document?

Let PaperHost be your solution.

We’ve addressed the benefits of document management in saving employee time and company money, but your investment will return positive results in many other aspects of employee performance as well as your company mission.

It is important to think about how a PaperHost document management system can also improve regulatory compliance, facilitate communication, increase accessibility of business archives, enhance competitive positioning, decrease errors and create a more enjoyable work environment for employees.

Whether it’s your child’s bedroom, your office desk or your entire company, getting organized is a task most people would prefer to put off. But why should you continue to waste company time and resources when a better system is available?

At PaperHost, we reach far beyond hosted content to manage the entire lifecycle of digital assets, including document capture, data lift, backup and archival services with free retrieval software.

Learn more about how web-based document management can revolutionize your business at www.PaperHost.com or contact us direct at 800-882-3573.

Let us drive the limo, while you focus on your business

You’ve been there—endlessly inputting data into spreadsheets thinking, ‘Isn’t there a machine that can do this for me?’

Why yes, there is.

And not only can the machine do it for you; it can make the process better than it was before. More efficient, more accurate. It’s called Automated Data Capture (ADC), and it has revolutionized how organizations work across all industries.

PaperHost’s phADC data capture solution automates the processing of printed documents and forms with enhanced capabilities that lift out relevant information and data elements on similar or dissimilar document formats.

This process can be applied to a wide rang of document types, such as forms, contracts, invoices, insurance documents, banking documents and many other documents with list-based or repeating data elements.

We’re certain your business, like any other business, has more than a few of these documents that continue to stack up, and we’re quite certain that your staff dreads the task of keying in all that information. Wouldn’t you?

Not only does the ADC process save you hours of manual keying, it maintains the integrity of the data, which might otherwise decline as you trudge through your 38^th invoice of the day.

It’s one of the most labor intensive, time consuming and expensive processes at your office. If it has to be done, why not hand it off to a company who can ensure it’s completed efficiently, accurately and cost effectively, allowing you and your employees to work on other important tasks?

Think of it like this: if you travel to and from the airport occasionally for business trips, you can bum a ride from friend or coworker. However, if you’re making multiple trips a day, it makes since to hire a professional service to increase productivity and reduce liability with a professional driver.

It’s the same with data processing. If you occasionally have to key in a little information, you can do it yourself. But eventually, the volume of documents becomes so burdensome that it’s inefficient and costly to key manually. That’s when it’s time to call in a professional.

Let us drive the limo, while you focus on your business. We can get you where you need to go in style, while saving you frustration and money at the same time!

PaperHost will send all the data back to you in customized data files to post or update existing internal applications that you depend on to run your business.

Other supplemental services include automatic conversion to PDF, extended text search capabilities and a robust Web based document management system that requires no capital investment. It’s Software as a Service (SaaS).

Give your employees a holiday and your bottom line a bonus this year by eliminating those never ending piles of documents and all the hours of manual data entry that come with them.

Learn more about document conversion and data lifting at www.PaperHost.com or contact us direct at 800-882-3573.